As the field of healthcare continues to become more specialized, the provision of services by many healthcare workers and/or providers to many patients may increase. In order to accomplish this, healthcare delivery has been organized into specialized departments or healthcare sources such as, for example, nursing, laboratory, pharmacy, and radiology departments. Each department has the responsibility for accomplishing its particular, often specialized, subset of tasks. Sometimes the departments are associated with different healthcare enterprises or offices having different geographic locations. Unfortunately, this has resulted in sub-optimal healthcare operations because patient information related to a single patient that is stored at various departments may not be easily accessible from a single place.
This patient information, or medical data, may be stored in a database environment configured to store large volumes of data. Furthermore, the medical data stored in the database environment may be processed by, for example, searching the stored medical data. Details with respect to conventional methods for storing and/or accessing medical data in and/or from databases is discussed in, for example, United States Patent Publication Nos. US 2003/0088438 and US 2003/0177132.
However, as the amount of available medical data expands, it may become increasingly difficult to store and/or access the medical data, especially for research and comparison purposes. For example, use of the medical data for purposes of diagnosing various medical conditions and/or researching medical areas may be very difficult. Accordingly, there is a need to improve storage of and access to medical data.